A bit of an offshoot from the previous The Secret Lives of People Who Yell From Cars. When I wrote the two pieces, neither one of them suited my purposes, and were shelved. A year later, cleaned up a little they make for good blog posts.

Okay, enough preamble:

My fellow citizens, we ask your patience.

We at the PWYFC, the support group for People Who Yell From Cars, feel it is time to foster understanding and acceptance of our members.

The PWYFC realizes that the time for yelling at people indiscriminately has passed in this country. Times change, and we must change with them. Yet we wish to remind you that yelling at people from cars, until recent times, was an acceptable and upstanding pastime.

Yelling at people while mobile has been around a very long time. Some would say it’s the second-oldest profession, second only to yelling at people while standing still. As soon as somebody created a moving platform to yell from, it was quickly utilized. The advantage of height was quickly apparent; the marvel of mobility must have seemed the next logical step.

History has a fine tradition of people yelling from horses, camels, elephants, litters, buggies, wagons.... The Ancient Egyptians may have been the first PWYFCs. Technically, they were People Who Yelled From Chariots. If a slave was slack, the Egyptian would drive by and let him know, usually with the lash of his whip.

Siegfried Marcus invented the first gas-powered automobile in 1870. History notes that the first thing Marcus did afterwards was take a spin around the block and yell at a lady for wearing pantaloons which weren’t puffy enough.

We wish to remind you that it was the celebrated Henry Ford who revolutionized modern yelling at people. With successful means of mass production, people could be yelled at from the convenience of one’s own personal transport. Zoom past, yell in perfect anonymity, and still get home in time to rebuff one’s butler for having an air above his station.

As agreeable as apple pie, yelling at people from cars, going on nearly a century now. It is our belief that people who yell from cars are merely misunderstood. Traditions, and the old ways, are being forgotten. Just recently a man I once counted amongst my friends pulled his car over to the side of the road and told me to stop yelling at people from the safety and comfort of his backseat, even going so far to compare me to a yappy little dog. He, and his ilk – as indeed they are, ilk – have forgotten the unwritten social service that people who yell from cars provide. People who yell from cars are the purveyors of social fluidity. I can’t stress how important that is. These days, people have no overriding commitment to a larger cohesion. Everybody feels they need to find their own way in the world – which, frankly, is balderdash – as if everybody could be special. They forget that they are merely one cell in a larger social organism. It has long been the role of people who yell from cars to remind society of our commonalities. If a person has parted ways with the center strata of acceptable dress and decorum, it is people who yell from cars who gently give them a pat back into place. I agree absolutely that sometimes the individual sentiments may sting a little, but a tangled mess of hair sometimes needs a going-over with a rough brush, and we are that brush. We’re the eveners, the straighteners. Without us, society would get even more tangled than it already is. My father was a yeller. His father was a yeller before him. My grandfather began yelling at ‘ducks’ ass’ haircuts and Davy Crockett hats on grown men, and carried on through beatniks, hippies, and long-haired freaks. When the day came that he could no longer fasten the wayward pips and nibs of society back together again, he passed the torch – and the keys to his Studebaker – to my father, who then yelled at disco hopheads, yuppies, and break dancers from the family seat. My father, in turn, was one of the first people from our province to attend the PWYFC convention in San Francisco. Back then, in the mid-80’s, the convention was but a small collaboration of nine or ten attendees. Very grassroots. They rented a van, rolled the windows down, and happily drove the hills all day yelling at aging hippies still hanging around their old haunts wearing patchouli and sandals. All in good fun. My father took me to my first convention when I was ten. By then, the event had grown. People came from all over the world to yell in Dutch, French, German – excellent yellers, the Germans. We rented the top floor of a hotel. The people below looked like ants. I’ll never forget my first afternoon driving around in a double-decker bus with my father, hanging over the side and yelling together.

An old vacation photo.

But times have changed. Last year’s convention was cancelled.

No hotels would rent to us. Somehow, every bus was booked when we called, no matter how loudly we yelled at them.

In retrospect, we probably could have handled that differently.

In a way, the boycott has proved beneficial. It’s forced me to get to know local yellers in my area better. Once a month we get together, have a few beers, play cards, and yell at each other. We play games: who can think of the most yells in under a minute, most creative yell of the night, and so on.

Sad, I know. But it’s who we are.

So, dear people, what I'm trying to say is this: we’re not the monsters you make us out to be. Surely, we're as loveable as kittens when compared to smokers, or bronies, or people who wear crocs. Just ordinary folk trying to get along in the world, the same as you, trying to help out the only way we know how.

We realize we have to change to suit the times, to adapt to the new social order. And I compose this letter to spread awareness and foster mutual respect.

In the meantime, if members of the public so please, there are ways they can aid us in our cause.

For instance, you can stop wearing silly hats with Teddy Bears on them, actual Teddy Bears. Or not slouch as you stroll – look up at the world and be happy. And stop wearing such strange boots and fancy jackets. And don’t wear brightly colored clothes, or clothes that are too dark. Stop having big noses, short hair, no hats, funny walks. Please, people, stop being so pedestrian.

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L.S. Burton

Farewell, third person bio.

Lee Burton doesn't have cats or kids, but he does have a lot of books, a couple of mugs he thinks are really fantastic, and a good pair of shoes which haven't fallen apart yet despite his best efforts to murder them with kilometers.Burton has written almost six books. Almost six as some are still scantily clad in their respective drawers. Each of them had their own goals and were written differently, and he is very fond of them all -- except perhaps for his first attempt at a novel, which remains a travesty. That one he keeps locked in a dark basement and feeds it fish heads. In 2011, Burton won the Percy Janes Award for Best Unpublished First Novel in the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Competition for his novel Raw Flesh in the Rising.

And just recently, in the fall of 2013, Burton published his first science-fiction novel, THIS LAND, about which he boasts constantly.